Liepaja Jewish Cemetery Burials, 1909-1941

The Liepaja Jewish cemetery was neglected but not greatly vandalized
during the German and Soviet occupations (1941-45 and 1945-1991).
Several burial record books survived and ended up in custody of the
1991 cemetery warden, Mr. Agris Furmanis. The Liepaja Cemetery
Administration reclaimed the most recent books, covering the period
1909-1941, and made copies available to the Jewish Community of
Liepaja. With the help of Ilana Ivanova, former head of the Community,
we obtained copies of these copies, and transcribed them for posting on
the Web. Book 1, listing 3564 names and death dates (including 5
between 1905 and 1908), has been transcribed and edited thus far and is
posted here; Book 2, giving names and grave locations but no dates, has
been transcribed but still needs to be proofed and edited. Both books
required major editing, as explained below. We present the data in
alphabetical as well as chronological order.

Names. At least 4 wardens worked successively on the
cemetery book between 1909 and 1941, recording dates, names, and
comments in German, but Jewish dates and father's names, in Hebrew.
Their name
spellings tended to be phonetic, without much consistency or concern
for the family's preferred spelling. We have tried to standardize surname
spellings to some extent, giving preference to the most common or most
authentic variants so that similar names would appear close together,
e.g., we changed Bekker to Becker, Oettinger to Ettinger, etc. The
original
spellings are listed in a separate column. We usually did not
standardize
uncommon names if the variants were close in alphabetical sequence, or
if the authentic spelling was uncertain. Nor did we standardize first
or father's names, except in cases of gross misspelling.

Legibility often was a problem. Some of the writing was less than
calligraphic, and some lines had faded badly or were partly obscured by
black blotches on the photocopy. Sometimes such names could be
recovered by comparison with Book 2. In a few cases, no first name was
given at all in Book 1, and if the surname was common, no unique match
could be found in Book 2.

From late 1937 on, the Latvian government required official records
such as cemetery books to be kept in Latvian. That involved several
major changes in spelling, as Latvian has no W, Y, or umlauts, uses
single characters for -sch or -tsch, attaches suffixes such as -s, -is,
or -a to names, etc. The wardens of that time had only modest knowledge
of Latvian spelling, but we were generally able to convert the names
back to German. However, some people had made voluntary changes toward
Latvian spelling as early as 1930, in order to ensure correct
pronunciation. Thus VOGEL
became FOGEL, WEINER became VAINER, CHAIT became HAIT, CHATZKEL became
HACKEL or HAKEL, etc. We have tried to standardize such spellings to
pre-1930
(German) usage, but in many cases the family itself used more than one
spelling.
We strongly urge all users to check all conceivable variants of a
surname.

Dates. They were written in the left margin of the
book, which on many pages was partly cut off in photocopying. Some 20%
of the dates were partly or wholly unreadable. We recovered most of
these dates from the Jewish dates, which were near the right margin.
However, on many pages the lower right corner was solid black, making
the Jewish dates unreadable. Most of the Jewish dates agreed with the
secular dates to within one day, consistent with the different starting
times of a day (midnight vs. sundown). But in more than 200 cases there
were larger discrepancies, from a few days to a month or more. In most
cases the secular date ought to be more reliable, as the wardens lived
in a secular society and presumably saw the official death certificate
with the correct secular date, whereas they had to look up the Jewish
date in a Jewish calendar. Occasional lookup errors seem likely.
However, in some cases the Jewish date seemed preferable.

Occasionally both dates were incomplete, only bracketing the true
date between two limits, e.g. the 7th and the 17th, or 5 June and 5
July. In such cases we interpolate the date between the two limits and
show this date in italics.

Dates prior to 1916 were given on the Julian calendar, which was the
official calendar in the Russian Empire. After Liepaja was occupied by
German troops in April 1915, the Gregorian calendar÷13 days ahead of
the Julian calendar÷was introduced, effective 1 January 1916. For most
of 1916, the cemetery book still recorded dates on both systems. We
have converted all dates to the Gregorian calendar.

Notes. Wardens 1 and 2 (1909-1926 and 1927-1930) often
added brief notes: marital status of women, ages of the young and very
old, unnatural causes of death, home towns of outsiders, etc. Many
poignant stories are hidden behind these notes: a 7-year-old girl
killed by a streetcar, six forced laborers who died in early 1917, the
synagogue water carrier Abram known only by his first name, a rash of
children's deaths in
the summer of 1917 and especially during the "Spanish flu" of 1919, a
murder
wave, including several double and triple killings 1918/22, four Jewish
soldiers who fell in the battle near Libau on 14 November 1919, a man
who hanged himself 4 months after the death of his daughter, etc. The
last
death recorded was on 21 June 1941, the day before the German attack
that
was to annihilate the Jewish Community of Liepaja. The 33 Jews among
the
47 victims of the first mass execution (Rainis Park, on 3 July 1941)
were
reburied in a mass grave in the Jewish cemetery a few days later. Their
names were recorded in some provisional record, and are engraved on a
stone
marker that was emplaced after the war.